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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

8 January - World Wide Science

This image shows all countries classified as "Food Insecure" by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO, between 2003 and 2005. more than 5% of the people have insufficient food more than 15% of the people have insufficient food more than 25% of the people have insufficient food more than 35% of the people have insufficient food more than 50% of the people have insufficient food (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Logo for the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the provocative title “Leapfrogging the Internet,” National Geographic Traveler
editor Keith Bellows recently illustrated the power of the mobile web
to level the playing field when it comes to knowledge and information
access. “Ten-dollar cell phones are easier to obtain than Internet
access in many parts of the developing world.” The article is about a
man named Ken Banks, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and the
software he invented called FrontlineSMS. It is text messaging
software, offered for free, and used in over 70 countries. By
installing the software on a computer, then connecting a mobile phone,
one can send text messages, with only one bar of phone signal, to rural
communities and groups. “It leapfrogs into places where digital
communication didn’t exist.” The article goes on to discuss how users
in the developing world have developed various modules for the software
including ones for use in medical, finance, and legal applications. Mr.
Banks says “My hope was to lower barriers to entry for technologies
that can be transformative. It’s about making software tools that work
where people need them the most.”
Like Mr. Banks, the
WorldWideScience Alliance strives to provide transformative technologies
to those who need them the most. The recent release of Mobile
WorldWideScience.org (http://m.worldwidescience.org
)
does just this. Mobile WorldWideScience.org makes over 80 scientific
and technical databases from around the world available to anyone with a
mobile phone. Using just a cell signal, users can search and retrieve
information from some of the world’s most preeminent libraries and
information centers. For many individuals in the developing world,
access to a computer and an Internet connection could be miles away.
Mobile phone usage is growing exponentially in Africa, for example, and
the new mobile version of WorldWideScience.org suddenly opens the door
to these users. It is very exciting to imagine users searching
WorldWideScience.org and finding information from the British Library,
the U.S. National Agricultural Library, the Institute of Scientific and
Technical Information of China, and so many others.To quote Mr.
Banks once more, “I’m not creating the change; I’m empowering it.”
WorldWideScience.org salutes Mr. Banks and others like him, and through
its own new mobile version, hopes to also “empower change” and to
improve the lives of people everywhere.
Reference:
“Leapfrogging the Internet” by Keith Bellows, National Geographic Traveler, July-August 2011, p.20, 26.

Lorrie
Apple Johnson is the Technical Product Manager for WorldWideScience.org
and an Operating Agent representative for the WorldWideScience
Alliance.

WorldWideScience.org
recently added several new databases, expanding its worldwide coverage
of scientific and technical information. The Synapse database, provided
by the Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (KAMJE), includes
information from over 100 medical journals. PLEIADI is the open access
platform for scientific literature in Italy, sponsored by
inter-university consortia CASPUR and CILEA. AGRIS is the international
information system for the agricultural sciences and technology – an
initiative run by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations.

In
2012, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory built on 60 years of
translating basic science concepts into technologies that address
pressing real world problems while expanding the boundaries of
fundamental science. The top 10 science and
technology stories of the year are a reflection of the Laboratory's
ability to apply its core national security competencies to a broad set
of national and global challenges, including: energy; climate change;
bio defense and detection; forensic science; high performance computing;
and materials science.

In
an effort to discover why forests around the world are disappearing,
Dr. McDowell, a plant physiologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory,
has set up a kind of intensive care unit for trees to find out precisely
how they die.

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